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TABLE OF CONTENTS

This guide was created by the staff of the GIS/Data Center at Rice University and is to be used for individual educational purposes only. The steps outlined in this guide require access to ArcGIS Pro software and data that is available both online and at Fondren Library.

The following text styles are used throughout the guide:

Explanatory text appears in a regular font.

  1. Instruction text is numbered.
  2. Required actions are underlined.
  3. Objects of the actions are in bold.

Folder and file names are in italics.

Names of Programs, Windows, Panes, Views, or Buttons are Capitalized.

'Names of windows or entry fields are in single quotation marks.'

"Text to be typed appears in double quotation marks."

This course will teach you how to download, evaluate, and prepare GIS data from public online sources and set up a project in ArcGIS Pro.

Obtaining Tutorial Data

COHGIS Open Data Portal

The COHGIS (City of Houston GIS) Open Data Portal website provides over 100 data sets including administrative boundaries, amenity locations, transportation routes, crime, and flooding. For this tutorial, we will download population and housing data from the 2010 census, which has been aggregated to super neighborhood boundaries.

  1. Using a web browser, search for "houston gis data" and select the result as shown below or or go directly to: https://cohgis-mycity.opendata.arcgis.com/.

Whenever you see a URL that ends in opendata.arcgis.com, you will know that you are visiting a standard ArcGIS Open Data portal.

  1. If you are looking for specific data, you can enter a term in the search box, but if you would like to see the full data catalog, click the Search button without entering a search term. You can then browse through the full list of data or filter by topic on the left side.

  1. In the 'Find' box, type "historic districts" and press Enter.



  2. Click COH HISTORIC DISTRICTS (City of Houston), as shown below.



  3. In the middle right, click Download > Shapefile.

  4. In your web browser, navigate back one page. 
  5. Click COH HISTORIC SITES/LANDMARKS, as shown below.

  6. In the middle right, click Download > Shapefile.

H-GAC GIS Datasets

The Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC) is the 13-county Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the Houston region. Federal legislation requires that an MPO be designated for each urbanized area with a population greater than 50,000 people (as established by the U.S. Census Bureau) in order to conduct long-range metropolitan transportation planning and be eligible for Federal funding for transportation projects. Their mission to carry out metropolitan transportation planning means that MPOs are a great source of data on topics such as demographics, employment, land use, transportation, and environmental conditions and most of these topics are well-suited towards GIS analysis.

Most of the data provided on the H-GAC portal is not originally created by the H-GAC, but rather is either aggregated from multiple municipalities up to the 13-country region, or clipped from the country or state down to the 13-county region.

  1. Using a web browser, search for "h-gac gis" and select the result as shown below or go directly to: http://www.h-gac.com/rds/gis-data/gis-datasets.aspx.



  2. Under the Dataset Categories section, click the Hydrologic button to filter the results by subject.

  3. Under the Datasets section, clickMajor Rivers.

  4. Click Download Dataset in the pop-up window.
  5. Click the blue Download button in the top right corner of the new window.

IPUMS NHGIS Datasets

The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides free online access to summary statistics and GIS boundary files for U.S. censuses and other nationwide surveys from 1790 through the present. 

 

Preparing the Downloaded Data for ArcGIS Pro

Once you have downloaded the historic sites and historic districts data from COHGIS Open Data Portal and the major rivers data from H-GAC, you will be able to find the data files in your Downloads folder. You will see that all the files are zipped, meaning they contain compressed files of data within them (you can tell a file is zipped when the file type column reads “Compressed (zipped) Folder”). You will need to unzip the folders to be able to see the data inside them. 

  1. On the Desktop, click the File Explorer icon located on the Windows Taskbar on the bottom left corner of the screen. 
  2. Navigate to the Downloads folder.
  3. Ensure that you see the following zipped folders in your Downloads folder.



  4. Select all three folders.
  5. Right-click any of the selected folders and select 7-Zip > Extract Here.

Your data sis now in its decompressed format and ready to be brought into ArcGIS Pro.

Creating a New Project in ArcGIS Pro

  1. From the Windows Taskbar, click to launch ArcGIS Pro.
  2. When ArcGIS Pro opens, under the Create a new project section on the right side of the screen, click the Blank project template.



  3. In the 'Create a New Project' window, for Name, type "Intro_Part2".
  4. For 'Location', click the yellow Browse... button to the right.
  5. In the 'Select a folder to store the project.' window, click Computer in the left column and click Desktop in the right column and click OK.



  6. In the 'Create a New Project Window', click OK.
  7. Maximize the ArcGIS Pro application window.

Managing GIS Data

  1. In the Catalog pane on the right, expand Folders > Intro > Intro.gdb

Connecting to a folder

  1. Right-click Folders and select Add Folder Connection.
  2. In the left column click Computer. In the right column, click Downloads and click OK.
  3. In the Catalog pane, expand Downloads.
  4. Fully expand all folders and geodatabases in the Downloads folder.

Exploring GIS Data File Formats

Previewing GIS data Using the Catalog View

previewing metadata & projections

previewing features

Examining GIS Data Coordinate systems

Importing and Exporting Data in the Project Geodatabase

Importing (copying) Geodatabase Feature Classes into the project geodatabase

Importing (converting) shapefiles into the project geodatabse

Exporting geodatabase feature classes to shapefiles

Disconnecting from your Downloads folder

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